Stefan Neville?s Pumice has always had an undeniable charm in the ways of ramshackle pop and dusted lo-fi noise excursions. Like New Zealand forbearers, Alastair Galbraith and Chris Knox, he favors minimal compositions that rely more on idiosyncrasy and the spontaneous home recording than rehearsed perfection. That being said, the brand new ?Pebbles? is easily the most compositional and far-reaching Pumice album I?ve heard to date. I?ve always been intrigued by Neville?s cast of sad characters (mostly variations of himself) populating broken music-box musings on the great existential slog, and while the guy undoubtedly has a gift for intimate melancholy, I never really wanted to take that ride with him. This doesn?t mean his earlier recordings are lacking. They just feel incubated from the outside world in such a way that the listener is unable to ever really break through. A sad thing when you consider how special this place can be.

That?s what?s so immediately rewarding with ?Pebbles.? Parts of it are downright poppy. Opener ?Eyebath? is just under 2 minutes of the most rollicking, bouncing guitar glee Pumice has ever unleashed. There?s a heavy early Flying Nun influence on this track, but then that could be said for much of this record. The piano and guitar abstraction of ?Bold/Old? is more in the classic Pumice mold?somber, creaking tones beneath mumbling, confessional vocals. Neville finds a nice medium between these two tracks in the plodding repetition of ?Brownbrownbrown.? Its sleepy/sloppy melody and impenetrable lyrics open up nicely to a dramatic chorus before receding like the tide. Then something really cool happens with the introduction of ?Stopover,? built upon another one of those bumpy melodies with Neville?s multi-tracked vocals conveying what sounds like reports of an extended vacation. He isn?t howling at the void here; it?s more like he?s rambling excitedly, sewing a patchwork of random adventures with offbeat detail and intimate asides. Halfway through the song he injects a feedback surge beneath trance-inducing guitar lines to reveal one of the most trance-inducing little eruptions ever heard on a Pumice record. This is as close to upbeat as I?ve heard this guy, and I want more.

Neville delivers more, too?well sort of. Towards the middle of the album, he opens up massively with a couple of epic drones that make me think of some long lost secret meeting between Neutral Milk Hotel and Gate. Massed organ, whose melody drowns out practically everything else, dominates the clanking fuzz wash of ?Greenock? to glorious effect. Another short Clean-like instrumental pops up and then we arrive at the head-soup fuzz mantra of ?Spike/Spear.? The merging of post-industrial hiss with minimal fuzz organ on this track invokes the static revelries of John Cale?s earliest minimal experiments crossed with the emotional intensity that Alastair Galbraith has always traded in. It?s simply a masterpiece. Add in a couple more ragged fuzz blasts, such as the caustic ?The Only Doosh Worth Giving? (early Hood covering the Clean?) and the groaning industrial chaos of ?Onion Union,? and you?ve got the most consistently diverse--and inviting--Pumice album to date. 8/10 -- Lee Jackson (17 July, 2007)